No one wants to see a CIA/FBI agent stuck behind a desk sending out 22 emails and going through bureaucratic red tape to get authorization to inspect the fruit seller's shop


Between December 2022 and March 2023, Netflix released a number of spy thriller series and I’ve had the [dis]pleasure of watching three of them - The Recruit, Treason and The Night Agent. All three of these Netflix series have one thing in common - they make spy work seem hella boring.

Earlier spy thriller shows like Nikita had intricately connected plots, a ridiculously strong and cunning protagonist, several very high-stakes situations and a spy who always had one last ace in the hole. This new batch of Netflix spy thriller however are disappointingly one-dimensional. The trope of having the conspiracy be orchestrated by someone high up and someone very close to the spy is not new but the problem is, on The Night Agent and co, that’s the whole plot. The ending isn’t surprising and the journey wasn’t entertaining.

The Recruit, The Night Agent and Treason take quite the time to find their rhythm and until the climax, you’re basically just watching spies running around chasing their own tails and very unsexily hiding from their team members hunting them. Treason might have done the rogue spy bit far worse than any of the three shows because, for the life of me, I can barely remember how the plot went. Just like The Night Agent, there was an extremely rude senior officer who everyone thought was corrupt but wasn’t. In The Recruit, the showrunners introduce some very unsavoury elements like heckling. Now, who thought it would be a good idea to have grown — actual middle-aged— CIA agents performing potentially life-ruining pranks on a younger agent?



The Night Agent (based on the novel of the same name by Mathew Quirk) does a better job plot-wise than its predecessors but still has quite a few failings. While it is similar to beloved spy thriller releases like the Bourne Series and 24, it still leans quite heavily on a few spy thriller tropes and the big twist could have been predicted from miles away. A lot of the male agents look the same — dusty blonde hair and square-jawed -- and in episode 10, where they have to fight one another, they all look like Gabriel Basso clones. The saving grace of this show is the quick-witted, no-bullshit Chief of Staff, Diane Farr (Hong Chao) who is a lot more complex than the other characters and more entertaining to watch.

You may argue that the Netflix-funded shows are trying to overhaul the spy fiction genre and make it a bit more realistic; more grounded. The flaw with this argument is that Netflix spy series are not very believable either. In The Recruit (probably the most unconvincing of the three), rookie agent Owen Hendricks (Noah Centineo) is able to loosen a toilet and escape through the hole in the time it takes for a very large man to break down a wooden door. He’s also able to hotwire a bomb in like 3 minutes from the items he has with him.

If Netflix can pass off any of this ridiculousness, they can give us an underdog spy who finds a way to steal money from the government to fund their rogue mission. I don’t want to see a spy try and fail very woefully to steal money, have to call his ex-girlfriend to pay for a hotel room while he’s on a mission or a top spy (number 1 at the MI6) who doesn’t have any underhanded resources to call on when his own daughter is kidnapped. What happened to unlimited budgets? What happened to good ol’ corruption and selling seized drugs to fund an operation?

This era of pencil-pusher spies is unexciting and doesn’t make for very good television. There’s a reason why there aren’t any (successful) motion pictures centred around a straight-laced tax clerk sitting in his cubicle in a lifeless grey office, filing taxes day after day. Throw in cocaine addict colleagues, an affair and a corrupt boss and we might have a story.

Both The Recruit and The Night Agent have been renewed for a second season.